Having signed Samuel L. Jackson up for a many, many picture deal to reprise Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD across a whole range of tied-together movies, I can’t see Marvel would fail to employ him in a single one. We’ve know for a while that he’s definitely cropping up in Iron Man 2, and it was reasonable to assume he’d also show for Thor.

Perhaps, though, he won’t… At least, that’s the inference of a new interview that delivers the following quote from Jackson:

Nobody’s told me anything. I was reading the trades last week and I saw the [Thor] cast list. My name was in it, so maybe I am doing something that I don’t know about and I’ll hear about it soon.

I think he’s just being coy. Maybe these stars are told to act like this in interviews – I mean, it certainly generates a lot of discussion about the films in question. It’s hard to believe he’s as naive about the whole process as he claims to be. Or maybe I’m wrong, and he’s out, Clark Gregg representing SHIELD instead.

In other Sam Jackson comics news, the first image has been unveiled of his upcoming book Cold Space. You can see it in full after the break. I think you might find the lead character rather recognisable…

If it isn’t the man himself. It looks to me like he could be carving out his own franchise from the ground up. If these books get optioned for films (do any comics not get optioned for films these days?) the lead-role casting should be a piece of cake anyway.

Bleeding Cool, who broke news of this comic and scored the image before anybody else, described the lead character thus:

…an on-the-run-outlaw crashlanded on a planet in the middle of a civil war.

I bet this outlaw has one heck of a way with comedy profanity.

Jackson and his c0-writer Eric Calderon met working on the Afro Samurai TV series, but this is their first strip. Jeremy Rock is doing the artwork, and Boom! start publishing the series this April.